Ireland targets 10% growth from India
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Tourism Ireland is expanding its marketing and promotional efforts in India to further drive the travellers number from here. “India offers a great potential. The number of visitors from India last year was about 27,500, an increase of 14 per cent over 2014. We feel that number this year will be very strong again. We know that the number of visa application is up by 20 per cent between January – June 2016. Air connectivity is improving all the time. We have Emirates now running double daily services from Dubai and Dublin and Etihad running double daily services from Abu Dhabi in the summer season and single in the winter season. Further, Emirates is going to add additional capacity to Dublin. So, 10,000 seats every week available to fly from Middle East to Ireland. This opens up great opportunity in India as Emirates and Etihad has a very strong connectivity to India,” Niall Gibbons, Chief Executive, Tourism Ireland said on the sidelines of the Tourism Ireland’s 2016 India Sales Mission. As of now, Ireland’s traditional markets are Great Britain, North America, Germany and France, comprising 70 per cent of the tourism business.
Latest Tourism Statistics suggest that visitors from Jan-Aug 2016 were up 12.3 per cent. “We welcomed 6.55 million visitors till August 2016. With Northern Ireland, we aim to welcome 10 million visitors this year, reflecting a very strong growth, in excess of 10 per cent,” he added.
Replying to a question over impact of BREXIT, Gibbons said that the long term impact of BREXIT is very hard to measure right now with the bottomline is that UK is still the member of EU. “The biggest concern from the tourism perspective is that we have a continuation of common travel area between UK and Ireland. There are things like UK visa Waiver scheme, the British Ireland visa scheme which we are very keen to continue whenever it happens. Post Brexit, it is significant to diversify into newer markets and thus we are reviewing our source markets at the moment. As part of market diversification, we have made submission to the Ireland Government for increase in budget for tourism promotion globally,” he added.
Commenting on the importance of Asia market, he said that Ireland has seen an increase in Chinese visitors which can hit 50,000 in 2016. “We are very optimistic that the number of Indian visitors will go over 30,000 this year and we are looking at increased visitors from Japan as well as we have just opened our Japanese website. We feel there are good prospects here,” he added.
Tourism Ireland recently launched a £7 million promotional campaign to boost late-season travel to Northern Ireland from around the world. The campaign – which is being rolled out in Great Britain, North America, Mainland Europe, Australia and emerging markets – will incorporate a major focus on city breaks, as well as on attracting visitors to more rural areas over the coming months.
Talking about the target audience, he said that Tourism Ireland is looking at culturally curious, social energisers and great escapers. Apart from these, we also target niche segments – including golfers, business and incentive visitors amongst other.